IT IS high in protein, low in fat and free from artificial additives. Vegetarians and anti-bloodsports campaigners won't like it but red grouse is about to be marketed as a healthy new meat alternative.

IF YOU were to believe everything you have read about the prospects for the Glorious 12th this year, you would be forgiven for thinking that those of us involved in the industry are running round, frantically echoing Private Fraser’s woeful declaration: "We’re doomed. We’re all doomed."

THE guns will be muted on the Glorious 12th of August - the start of the grouse shooting season - as the game bird’s breeding rates have plummeted in the past year, according to figures released by the Game Conservancy Trust in Scotland this week.

GROUSE shooters are busy cleaning their guns for the start of the season on the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ of August, but experts have predicted a washout season after a drastic decline in the bird population.

August 12 presumably isn’t considered glorious in some corners of the avian population, since this is the day grouse-shooting begins. It’s also a sorry anniversary in the history of animal extinction since on that date in 1883 the very last quagga - which looked like a dodgy cut and paste of a zebra and a horse - died in the Amsterdam Zoo.

Guests at Balavil Estate will awaken tomorrow morning to the smell of sizzling bacon and the scent of the hunt. The Glorious 12th, the official start of the grouse shooting season, as decreed in the Game Act of 1831, is a celebration of family, friends and the fast flight of these crowned kings of fowl.

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